New technology could make spam too costly for its peddlers

Remember that economics class you hated so much and slept most of the way through? Well, two men from Massachusetts were paying attention, and their studies may well one day save us all from spam.

Marshall Van Alstyne, associate professor of information systems at Boston University, and Phil Raymond, president of Vanquish, an anti-spam company from Marlborough, believe there is an economic solution to spam.

Their idea: every time you get an e-mail, the sender receives an automated response asking whether the message is junk mail.

The price for lying? A few cents.

"If they won't make the promise, their e-mail will be returned unopened, if they do make the promise, the e-mail will be delivered," Van Alstyne said. "If it's spam, you would get to claim the warranty, so the 2 cents will become yours. No spammer can afford to make that promise."

The banking system would work like a phone bill -- it's a mini bank account attached to your e-mail.

"If any legitimate advertiser wants to contact you, they might buy your time for a few cents," Van Alstyne said. "Your long-lost friends are going to be entirely happy to make that promise."

Once spammers have to start paying even a few pennies to send junk mail, they'll lose profitability. As things are now, Van Alstyne said, spammers can turn a profit if only one in 10,000 people responds.

"It's an incredible burden on the nation," Raymond said.

He said the problem with current filters is that they block out bulk e-mails and unsolicited e-mails, when either of those could potentially be messages people would like to receive.

"It's no longer important whether you know the sender. What's really important is whether the sender knows enough about you," Raymond said of the new system. "We have nothing against pornography. But you should be looking for it -- it should not be looking for you."

Vanquish is a standard anti-spam company that uses new technology and sells to individual buyers. The company uses something called challenge response -- when you send someone an e-mail, you get a return e-mail asking you to verify that you are not spam. It also uses subject-line recognition -- your computer knows if someone responds to a subject line you sent out -- and a simple address book -- a running memory of who you've written to and who has written to you.

While it keeps the majority of spam out of your inbox and the majority of legitimate e-mail out of your spam folder, it does not solve the larger problem. But it can.

"We're traditional anti-spam, and we're the best in the breed doing it, but our problem is selling that greater vision," Raymond said of the economic plan. "So we said, 'Let's secretly put this in every single program, it's the secret sauce in there.'"

So all anti-spam programs Vanquish sells contain the coding to allow any e-mail address to participate in this economic system as soon as it becomes viable.

"It needs a couple of large ISPs to adopt it and protect their user base and it will pretty much snowball and start working," Van Alstyne said.

The two men did not know each other when they each came up with the idea separately, but they met in their pursuit to make it a reality. They do not work together, but the work one does usually helps the other.

"Van Alstyne is the researcher and we are the pioneer. We are deploying this into the whole world right now," Raymond said. He said much of the claims they have known to be true about the system, Van Alstyne has proved mathematically.

"We did get it right," Raymond said. "Even if we only end up with a couple patents, this will be how interpersonal contact between strangers is mitigated."